Albert K. Cohen

“In his book Delinquent Boys (1955) Cohen was concerned to answer a number of questions about delinquency that he felt were not satisfactorily dealt with by Merton's strain theory. These questions sought to investigate:”

“In the status game, then, the working-class child starts out with a handicap and, to the extent that he cares what the middle-class persons think of him or has internalised the dominant middle-class attitudes toward social class position, he may be expected to feel some 'shame'.”

“It is generally assumed that... register data are more representative than court data, which are the result of a long selective process of complaint, arrest, arraignment and prosecution.”

“A learned man, Emile Durkheim,”

“A comparative social science requires a generalized system of concepts which will enable the scientific observer to compare and contrast large bodies of concretely different social phenomena in consistent terms.”